It’s December! The leaves have all fallen, our WNC mountains will hopefully be covered in some snow soon, and the preparation for winter holiday celebrations is in full swing. There are so many ways to create handmade creations with your kiddos for family and friends over the holidays.

Here are a few ideas.

Gift bags

Go grab that pile of brown grocery bags you are waiting to recycle or the collection of gift bags you’ve saved from the last year of birthdays and reuse them for gift wrapping this winter. Of course you can draw, write or create patterns using tape and paint. But another super fun idea is to combine some simple printmaking with drawing.

In this project we used circles and white acrylic paint to create the structure of a snowman/woman on the bags. Let your child print the circles however he or she feels empowered to. Can the top circle be the biggest? Sure! Can they create triangles instead of circles? Sure! Let them dry and draw around and over it adding the personality of your snow person or creature. Serious fun!

After making the outside of a card, use a stiffer paper to create the pop-up inside.(Photo: Courtesy of Ginger Huebner)

Pop-up cards

You’ve probably done these before, but I want to challenge you to think about how many different mediums you could use on one card. In this example we watercolored an 8.5-by-11 piece of watercolor paper. We folded it in half and then created our pop up image using sharpies on Bristol board (thick, smooth white paper).

Your child could also add collage and special papers to their design, and make more than one pop-up design to add. To attach the pop-up image simply glue a small strip of accordion folded paper between the pop up image and watercolor background. The recipient will adore it!

Whatever you celebrate this winter, I hope you can steal some time to create with your family and friends. Now go make something!

Post your winter holiday creations on Instagram and use the hashtags #rootswingsarts and #avlkids so we can see your work!

Ginger Huebner is the director of Roots + Wings School of Art and Design, www.rootsandwingsarts.com.